‘My motivation was to take a shot at curative tumour chemotherapy, based on a mechanism that has not been explored for drugs before – reversibly light-targetable cytotoxins.

The idea is to apply the drug globally in the patient, but activate it locally in the tumour by illuminating the tumour zone with pulses of blue light. Outside the tumour zone, the drug should remain inactive. One could therefore use higher doses than conventionally possible, so therapeutic effectiveness can be improved whilst limiting side effects.

‘It turns out, that photostatins are a great proof-of-concept on the molecular level for this idea! Our initial photostatins can essentially be switched ON and OFF (and /ON/OFF/ON/…) – since the ON state is more than 250 times more toxic than the OFF state: this is about an order of magnitude more powerful than any switchable compounds shown before. We can reversibly toggle between those states inside living cells and tissues just by applying light or not – which is also a new step for the field. So we can set up spatially-defined toxicity – a proof-of-concept for tumour-site-selective therapy.’

Oliver got hooked on classical organic chemistry in high school, deviated into theoretical chemistry and optics during his degree at the University of Sydney in Australia, returned to focus on bioorganic chemistry for his PhD at the University of Lyon in France, then found a home in the Trauner research group at the University of Munich in Germany, where he combined his passion for organic synthesis, logic and modelling, light, and chemical biology, to work on photostatins in his current position as postdoc.

Oliver and his colleagues continue to work on tuning the light response of photostatins, using substituent pattern shifts for small changes as well as designing entirely different response regimes. This is aimed at sophisticated research applications, looking deeper into cell functions than current photostatins can do; and also to develop photostatins that can be controlled by red light in deep tissue settings.

The project itself began in 2012 when Thorn-Seshold ran out of funding for his PhD and couldn’t get an extension to finish it. So together with Gosia Borowiak, who was also finishing her PhD, they submitted cancer-targeting strategies to small funding calls and eventually scraped together three different funds to cover 75 days’ work.

‘We hit many problems, bridging chemistry and biology with optics, but I think having disjointed skills – I hadn’t even seen a cell under a microscope and Gosia’s last time in the chemistry lab was 10 years ago – worked out well, as by really working together we could do something new in chemical biology despite our total inexperience in each other’s fields.’

Thorn-Seshold and his colleagues have now published this research in the journal Cell.

The history of chemistry is littered with memorable quotes like this, penned by Johann Joachim Becher, in the 1667 work Physica Subterranea. The best quotes are striking sentences or poignant paragraphs that hold fast in the mind, long after their source has faded from memory, snippets and soundbites that encapsulate feeling or opinion.

To celebrate quotable chemistry, we’re launching a competition to find our favourite quotations. Send in humorous or inspiring quotes, along with a reference for where we can find them, and you could win £50 of Amazon vouchers! Second place will win a £25 voucher, and three runners up will each receive a Chemistry World mug.

To make sure your quotes are available to the widest possible audience, we’re working with the Wikiquote project to collect and archive the quotes for posterity. I’m sure you’re familiar with Wikipedia, and Wikiquote is one of a dozen or so projects run along similar lines (freely accessible and reusable content, compiled by volunteers from all around the world) by the Wikimedia Foundation. It’s a compendium of humorous and inspirational quotations by notable people, all checked for veracity and cited back to original sources. And, of course, like Wikipedia, it’s a compendium that anyone can edit.

Wikiquote has a section on chemistry-related material and we, working with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Wikimedian in residence, Andy Mabbett, are going to expand it – with your help. As well as offering prizes for the best (the funniest; the most poignant) chemistry related quotations; we will share all the entries with the Wikiquote community.

To be in with a chance of winning, simply send us a quotation, plus the name of the author and the source (a web link is fine, as is citation to a journal or book, but please be as precise as possible; giving page numbers, for example). Check first, to make sure your entry isn’t already in Wikiquote!

The full terms and conditions are below, but the most important things to know are:

We can only accept entries by email (feel free to tweet your favourite quotes, but they won’t count if they don’t reach our email inbox)

The competition opens at 12:01pm on 9 July 2015 and closes at 12:01pm on 31 July 2015.

Entries must be submitted by email and include the entrant’s full name and county. Multiple entries can be included in the same email, if they are all from the same entrant.

Entry is open worldwide, but voucher prizes will be offered in Stg£ only.

Entrants under the age of 18 are welcome, but must include written consent from a parent or guardian in their email entry.

All entries must be notable quotation related to chemistry that are not already listed on Wikiquote, and that have an author, and a source that is suitable for citation.

Quotations will be shared with the Wikiquote community, but suggestion of a quotation does not guarantee inclusion on Wikiquote.

The winner will be the person deemed to have submitted the most entertaining or unusual chemistry quotation as determined by the judges. There will be one top prize, one second prize, and three runners-up prizes.

The winners will be selected by a judging panel including the editor of Chemistry World. The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

The prizes on offer are one Stg£50 Amazon voucher for first place, one Stg£25 Amazon voucher for second place, and three Chemistry World mugs, of which the runners-up selected will receive one each.

The winners and runners-up will be contacted by email (using the details provided in the winner’s Eligible Entrants entry email).

The prize winners will be notified that they have won the prize within twenty eight days (28) of the closing date of the competition.

The promoter is the Royal Society of Chemistry a charity registered in England (with number RC000524) and limited company incorporated in England (with number RC207890) located at Thomas Graham House, Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WF United Kingdom (Promoter).

The Promoter is not responsible where applicable for any problems or technical malfunction of any communications network or any late, lost, incorrectly submitted, delayed, ineligible, incomplete, corrupted or misdirected entry whether due to error, transmission interruption or otherwise. The time of entry will be deemed to be the time the entry is received by the Promoter at the designated email account.

If for any reason, including but not limited to technical problems, the competition is not capable of running as planned we reserve the right to cancel the competition.

The names and counties of the winners and runners-up will be published online on the Chemistry World blog, and in other RSC magazines.

Entry details remain the property of the Promoter. Entrants consent to the Promoter using personal information provided in connection with this promotion for the purposes of facilitating the conduct of the promotion and awarding any prizes (including to third parties involved in the promotion, including any applicable statutory authorities).

These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and the parties submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

As beacons of success in the scientific community, it seems strange that a few Nobel laureates in attendance at Lindau have highlighted the important role failure and frustration play in any scientific endeavour.

Panellists discuss the state of research in Africa and the importance of role models for the younger generation Credit: Adrian Schröder/Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings

Upon taking to the stage this morning, Steven Chu, 1997 Nobel laureate in physics, described his early career in science as ‘a series of failures’. He discussed how, during his days as a postdoc student, he would become fascinated by a problem, only to quickly move on when spurned in his attempts to answer it.

During his talk on fluorescence microscopy, Eric Betzig, a 2014 laureate in chemistry, openly admitted that he became deeply frustrated with the path his discipline was taking and decided to leave science all together before later arriving back on the scene with a new outlook on scientific inquiry.

In a similar vein, the famed crystallographer, Dan Shechtman, likened his quest to challenge the status quo to that of a cat walking through a gauntlet of German Shepherds.

And yet, they are all here to tread the boards of the Lindau stage. Many have cited perseverance and tenacity as crucial tools in obtaining success in science, but all here at Lindau have stressed that the fortuity of having a brilliant mentor and role model is what set them on the right path.

Like the pervasiveness of the uncertainty principle in science however, the laureates know that each young scientist should have an effective teacher, they just don’t agree on what makes them effective.

This was perfectly encapsulated by Avram Hershko when he highlighted the dichotomy in attitudes between the two scientists who aided him in his early research career. His first true mentor was Jacob Mager from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, who was a ‘rigorous experimentalist’ and had a fierce reputation for adhering to the scientific method. But when Hershko moved to the University of California, US, under the tutelage of Gordon Tomkins, he was exposed to the unbridled imagination of a scientist who didn’t really care for the minutia in experimental detail.

In both cases Tomkins and Mager provided Hershko with an effective canvas to map out his scientific journey, but prove that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to scientific mentorship.

Elsewhere in the conference, the lack of awareness about scientific role models and how this is having a negative impact on science was raised during a panel discussion on the research landscape in Africa. Panel members were quick to address how children in the education system will struggle to break into science if there aren’t any ideals or scientists to aspire to. ‘African students … are aware of Albert Einstein – me too, I like him, he’s the best scientist,’ said Serge Fobofou from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry, Germany. ‘We know less about African scientists.’

Without the Magers and Tomkins of this world having a visible presence in Africa, we run the risk of scientific failure being the end of the road and not simply an obstacle to leap over.

On the idyllic island of Lindau, Germany, you can’t help but be inspired by the beautiful vistas that envelope this small getaway on the edge of Lake Constance, with the town itself embodying the very spirit of the scientific meeting that is currently taking place here.

At the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting, 65 Nobel laureates from an array of scientific disciplines are hoping to inspire over 650 young scientists from across the world. These early career researchers have been selected from a vast amount of applicants to engage in scientific debate, foster new working relationships and gain inspiration from those who have dared to challenge scientific paradigms.

Delegates were treated to a series of fascinating talks on Monday morning from some of the most recent recipients of the famed Nobel medal. Stefan Hell and Eric Betzig, two recipients of the 2014 Nobel prize in chemistry for their work on super-resolution microscopy, kicked things off in earnest with frank discussions on how they arrived at this point. Hell’s talk in particular resulted in a poignant moment where he confessed that ‘it’s not the 2015 me who started this, but the 1990 me – he deserves the credit’.

This sentiment for creativity and ingenuity as young PhD students was echoed by all of the morning’s speakers, who included fellow laureates Francois Englert, Michael Bishop and the incoming president of the Royal Society, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. All helped to drive home the point that the formative years of any researcher’s career are some of their most fruitful.

Following lunch, delegates wandered through the cobbled streets to the town’s local theatre and sat down for a captivating panel discussion on the nature of interdisciplinary science. The febrile pronouncements from the morning’s session quickly made their way into the panel’s intense discourse.

Betzig was keen to point out that collaboration across scientific boundaries is never an end goal, but grows organically from a fearless conviction to solve a problem. Steven Chu, the 1997 Nobel laureate in physics and US Secretary of Energy until two years ago, was quick to retort, however, that students should not take for granted the power in obtaining great knowledge in a singular science: ‘You have to be deep in a field in order to branch out in a new field.’

But that past knowledge, the pillars of science that some may dare not question, are ultimately what hold us back according to Hell. ‘If you do not detach yourself from previous knowledge, to some extent, you … stay within the framework of this existing knowledge,’ he commented.

Their tenacity to challenge convention is ultimately why these laureates have come to establish new paradigms. But, as the week continues and they continue to inspire these impressionable researchers, I wonder what they will say when these young scientists eventually come to break down theirs?

For live tweets throughout the week, make you sure you check out the twitter hashtag #LiNo15.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this is a source of great frustration for a lab-based scientist. So much of your time is dedicated to setting up and running your experiment. Once you’ve made a plan and began the experiment, you have no choice but to blindly carry on assuming everything is fine, before you reach the end and discover whether or not it has worked. If it had then great! You can get on with the important business of analyzing your results to see how they fit in with the rest of your work. If your experiment didn’t work, you need to start the tortuous process of troubleshooting to find out what went wrong.

I have to confess that I enjoy the in between steps, the calm before the storm. There is a certain happiness in not knowing, freeing you up to concentrate on each step of your work, rather than the overall result. At this stage there is positivity and hope that your meticulous planning is going to give you the results you need. This positive attitude can last right up until the results come in, when the illusion can be shattered by the lovely picture of your positive controls and not much else.

So what to do now? Small changes to one of the steps in your process can make a huge difference to your results. Having a good set of both positive and negative controls can be a great help during troubleshooting: if the results show just your positive controls you know the problem is with your samples, if there are no results you know the problem is with the experiment. Now where will I find that error?

It is even more frustrating if you have inherited the protocol, or are trying to replicate one given in a paper. Even worse is a failing in a method you’ve had success with in the past! You can resolve many problems with patience and dedication, but sometimes it’s worth running the problem by someone else just to check you are not making a simple mistake that you have overlooked. Is the incubator at the wrong temperature? Have you added the wrong antibiotic? (Both common sleep deprivation related problems.)

You can spend days, weeks, even months tweaking the conditions of your experiment to make it work. But it is important that you don’t keep going round in circles or blindly repeating yourself, take notes, take a step back or take a deep breath and ask for help! Everyone has bad days in the lab, it’s how you react to them that shows how well suited you are to science.

The concept of anaesthetics and their application to relieve pain during surgery was not wholly new. The Mesopotamians used alcohol (and its use persisted in resource deprived times such as war as late as 1812) and the ancient Chinese used acupuncture. The Sumerians may have used opium and Egyptians mandrake, and around a similar time, juniper and coca were put the the same use.

A popular anaesthetic in England between ~1200 and 1500 was Dwale – a mixture of varying composition containing opium and hemlock as well as lettuce, bile and bryony. Mandrake roots were chewed, extracting the active ingredients in doses that varied with chewing time or vigour. This was a risky business: low doses were often insufficient to fully mask the pain of surgery or put the patient to sleep, but at doses not much higher, many of these substances would become fatally toxic. Enough to make you numb just thinking about it.

However, these drugs have pronounced differences from the ones we are now familiar with. Most were applied locally, by rubbing a paste into the skin.

Because of the suffering and associated risks, many patients would choose not to undergo surgery, even in the face of otherwise certain death. The best surgeons were the fastest surgeons and although anaesthetics were administered, they were normally considered unreliable and untrustworthy. There was also the problem of testing new products – animal testing had limited feedback, and many drugs were piloted during dental operations or other painful, low-risk medical procedures. Even as late as the early 1800s, Henry Hill Hickman was busy gassing animals with carbon dioxide, trying to achieve the perfect balance between loss of sensation and death, where he might amputate one of their limbs without objection.

Luckily there was a good resource of keen volunteer test subjects just waiting to be tapped into: Party goers.

During the late 18th century, chemists as we now know them started to emerge. Amongst their many exploits was the extraction and characterisation of many of the active ingredients found in ancient remedies. Opium was found to contain morphine, a narcotic pain reliever, and the active components of the mandrake root are atropine and scopolamine – two alkaloids that, similar to coniine, the hemlock ingredient, produce varying effects from respiratory paralysis to heart palpitations. In coca, cocaine acts as a stimulant, and in juniper, terpinen-4-ol is simply a diuretic. Purifying these products allowed better dose control, understanding of the mechanism behind the active drug, and the classification of groups of compounds, allowing potential new products to be identified and developed. In particular, a new theory of gases was developed accompanying the discovery of dozens of new kinds of air, work pioneered by the gas giant Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, ammonia, hydrogen chloride and, in 1772, nitrous oxide, which he formed by combining iron metal and nitric acid, then collecting the bubbles of gas this produced.

Later, in 1799, Sir Humphrey Davy realised that nitrous oxide, or NO2, could be breathed by humans, and that breathing it produced a rather interesting result – it made you laugh. Nicknaming his discovery ‘laughing gas’, Davy went on to demonstrate the hilarious effects of nitrous oxide at the Royal Society, and several parties, where the habit took on. Alongside laughing gas, breathing ether became popular, and all the best parties had them.

It was whilst under the influence of one of these favourite party boosters that one man literally stumbled upon scientific enlightenment. At an 1844 event, Horace Wells looked on as a man seriously damaged his leg, but carried on with his activities regardless. When questioned about his lack of regard for the bleeding appendage, he told Wells he couldn’t feel any pain from it. Wells quickly realised that the laughing gas had altered the man’s perception of pain – a pain he would wake to when the effect of the nitrous oxide wore off.

Along with other fathers of modern anaesthesia, Horace Wells turned party time into serious science – as painlessly as possible. Through understanding of circulation, dosage and patient idiosyncrasy, the general anaesthetic was realised, and surgery revolutionised, NO contest.

The taste of sweet success! But what is that flavour exactly, chewing gum or bon bons? The latest Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry (OBC) issue comes covered with sugary carbohydrate goodness and fullerene balls. Not at first obvious partners but throw in some lectins and you’ve got a hit.

On the cover a gumball machine has been set up in the lab with a few of the tasty C60 balls spilling out across the bench. The test tubes arranged at the back signify that the green, blue, red and yellow balls are obviously full of artificial colourings to make them tempting, but these are not for human consumption. In fact they are meant for bacterial consumption.

The bacteria in question produce fucose binding proteins, carbohydrate receptors that can be targeted for therapeutic reasons. On the cover, a schematic has been left out on the lab bench showing the fullerenes modified with linkers and terminating in fucose units, which then have a multivalent effect binding to one or more of the proteins.

The work focuses on the inhibition of two fucose binding proteins with very different binding site geometries. LecB is your typical brick–like protein with four binding sites (one at each corner), whilst RSL is a hexamer ring with 6 binding sites positioned around the bottom face of the hoop. So what binds best to these different sugar hungry proteins? The modified fullerenes can be used to present the sugars in a wide display and after testing different spacer lengths and different valencies they found that, contrary to most medical advice, more sugar was generally better. But only generally – because it depends on the geometry of the binding sites, matching this display also your helps your cause. And if there are too many binding units then it can get too crowded and nobody can get their hands on the sugary groups. Therefore, presentation, arrangement and quantity are all important for attracting the most guests to your desert table.

Not one but two delightful treats were conceived by the authors for showing off their sugary balls. The digital abstract focuses on a set of fullerene based cakes. I wonder if there was competition in the lab as to which recipe would make it to the cover? Cakes and other sticky treats are often used to highlight carbohydrate/sugar research and offer one of many simple means to entice public interest. My old (in the sense of in the past, not by age I hasten to add) PhD supervisor, Bruce Turnbull, shows off his research and his lab’s sweet tooth with the traditional group cake bakeoff, now a modest Twitter sensation. And check out this great YouTube video starting with the sugar in your cup of tea and ending with fertilisation.

Funding for this publication was partly provided by the European COST action MultiGlycoNano, which I was also fortunate to benefit from during my time at university. This European money pot took me to Holland, Italy and France, the latter being where I actually first met Anne Imberty, one of the authors of this study, and heard her talk about lectin binding. My own research on protein-carbohydrate interactions was very close to this subject, although not referenced by this OBC paper (come on Anne; do my H-index a favour!)

The paper is marked as a Hot Article in OBC, which means that it is free to read for the next 4 weeks. So go go go read it now before you have to pay and before the bacteria get their receptors all over those gumballs.

UPDATE:

Jean-François Nierengarten, one of the authors of the OBC paper, sent us some extra pictures of chemical confectionery (fondant fullerenes?) with the following explanation:

You may be interested by the story behind this picture. One post-doc of the group, Sebastian Guerra, has shown the picture to his father in law, Mr Pellaton, he is the owner of a chocolate shop in a small Swiss village (Peseux). After a couple of weeks, the fullerene-shaped chocolate became reality, a quite unexpected application of our research project on fullerene sugar balls. Of course, the prototype did not survive a long time at home when my son realized that the fullerene ball was made from real chocolate!

Tom Branson is wondering if there was a competition in the lab as to which recipe would make it to the cover. Actually, it was not the case. During my spare time, I enjoy preparing 3D figures with Cheetah3D (a fantastic software for Mac). I had the one with the chocolate ready at the time we submit the paper (I’m using it for my lectures) and following the invitation to prepare the cover, I had simply an excuse to prepare a new figure!

As an additional example, I have enclosed a figure I’m using to illustrate a very recent Chem. Sci. paper in my lectures:

’Many scientists, I think, secretly are what I call “boys with toys.”’

This poorly conceived comment by Shrinivas Kulkarni, an astronomy and planetary science professor at the California Institute of Technology, was made on National Public Radio (NPR) and within hours, Twitter was abuzz with activity. Using the hashtag #girlswithtoys, female scientists from all over the world began posting pictures of themselves with their ‘toys’ – from telescopes to distillation kits to robots – to show that girls are scientists with fun toys too! This flippant comment highlights the unconscious bias that is all too common in the science world as it perpetuates the notion that science is a man’s world. The list of Nobel prize in chemistry winners also reflects this attitude, with only four females having won the prize to date. Of course, there have been many highly influential and talented women who were worthy of prize.

This month’s blog will concentrate on the unsung hero of the discovery of the structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin. Franklin’s x-ray diffraction images, which implied a helical structure for DNA, were key in determining the structure of DNA. James Watson and Francis Crick used this information in their Nature publication in 1953, where they gave Franklin and Maurice Wilkins an acknowledgement for their contributions. In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their work on the structure of DNA but Franklin was left empty handed. Franklin died in 1958 and only living people can win the Nobel prize, so sharing the 1962 Nobel prize was not possible. However, the Nobel archives show that no one ever nominated her for the prize in physiology or medicine, or even the chemistry prize, despite the fact that her findings were undoubtedly significant to the discovery.

As you can see from her academic family tree, Franklin is connected to a considerable number of Nobel prize winners in medicine or physiology, physics and chemistry. In 1938, Franklin began her studies in chemistry (natural sciences) at Cambridge University and remained there to undertake physical chemistry research under Ronald Norrish, who won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1967 for his flash photolysis research. In 1951, Franklin began work at King’s College as a research associate under Sir John Randall, alongside Wilkins and Raymond Gosling. It was at Kings College that Franklin applied her x-ray diffraction expertise to the structure of DNA.

Through Kenneth Holmes, Franklin is also connected to Aaron Klug who won the 1982 Nobel prize in chemistry for his research on crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes. Franklin also worked with Klug during her time at Birkbeck College and he became a supporter and advocate – writing a Nature article on how Franklin came to find the correct structure of DNA and taking part in an interview on what it was like working with her. During her time at Birkbeck College, Franklin worked under John Bernal, himself a pioneer in x-ray crystallography within molecular biology. Bernal began his illustrious research career under the supervision of William Bragg, who shared the1915 Nobel prize in physics with his son for their x-ray diffraction research.

It is a great shame that Franklin could not share 1962 prize for her key role in determining the structure of DNA, however, I do hope that she is remembered as one of the great women in science.

If you are a woman in science, why not head to Twitter and post your picture with a chemistry tool or instrument, using the hashtag #girlswithtoys, to show the world that chemistry girls have cool toys too!

Working in the lab over time teaches you many new skills. These include the many specific techniques your research demands as well as the enhanced organisation and time management skills you need to keep things running smoothly. But lab work can also teach you to become fairly ambidextrous.

You often need enough strength and agility in your non-dominant hand to handle tricky objects while your dominant hand is busy, such as opening and holding a bottle while using a pipette to remove the amount of liquid you need.

Time and practice lets you build up a good level of dexterity in both hands, but there are still many things in the lab that can be difficult to use (or just annoying) if, like me, you are left handed.

Problems can occur when communal equipment is set up for right-handed people, for example gel running tanks: if you are loading your gel with your left hand you can end up contorting into strange positions in order to achieve the correct angle. Fail to do so and you may get the wrong well! The only other option seems to be moving the equipment every time you need to use it.

But sometimes the problem lies in design: in fume cupboards and some machines, all of the buttons or taps tend to be on the right hand side. We left-handers either have to adapt how we do our experiment so we can reach or just use our right hands instead. Luckily, practice makes perfect!

A major bugbear of mine is the pipette. There are some brands that I just can’t use due to their design: I’ll quite happily put the tip on and start to transfer the small volume of liquid, but somewhere along the way I will have caught the tip release button with the bottom of my thumb and the liquid will slowly be seeping out, not very useful when accuracy is paramount. Other brands are absolutely fine and I can use them without incident, but it can be very frustrating trying to work out which pipettes I can use, so woe betide anyone who takes my special pipettes!

Although being left handed can be a nuisance in the lab, it’s barely a minor inconvenience compared with the problems faced by, for example, wheelchair users. Some labs now have height adjustable fume cupboards that allow people in wheelchairs to work comfortably at the hood, but we still have a long way to go before labs are truly accessible.

For me, once I had overcome the problems associated with being left-handed in the lab, there’s nothing stopping me from getting on with the science and producing some good results!

So what happens when the need to get ahead conflicts with the availability of funding? When the cupboard is bare and you still need to go to that big conference, do you break open the piggybank? When you need that fancy device to analyse your data, do you pile the purchase onto your student loans?

Our research project is starting to show that on many occasions scientists are using their personal income for these activities.

Brett Favaro and I are marine biologists, and we’re worried that an unsustainable situation may be developing in our field – one in which scientific progress and the dissemination of scientific ideas is contingent on the willingness of our colleagues to sacrifice part of their income to the cause. We’re also worried that the need to spend personal funds on research may be an emerging barrier to a new generation of marine biologists. Furthermore, having started to discuss our concerns openly via social media, we’ve realised this is not an issue confined to our discipline. Progress in the chemical sciences as well as future chemistry careers might also be at risk.

We’ve talked to one friend who has to pay bench fees from her own pocket. If she doesn’t pay them, her biochemistry research simply could not happen. In addition, an early response to our research came from a chemist who claimed to have paid nearly $5000 (£3230) in lab start-up costs and about $2000 per year on rolling research costs. Another early respondent told us she paid for all of her research because she wasn’t allocated time to do it in normal working hours, despite it being a requirement of her role as a chemistry lecturer. She paid childcare costs so she could concentrate on completing research in her ‘spare time’.

We’ve had nearly 1500 responses to our research so far, with each respondent filling in an online survey detailing their personal spending on research (or #scispends, as we’re calling them). Great though that response has been, our research networks are in the biological sciences and more than 75% of responses have come from colleagues in our own discipline. We don’t want to waste an opportunity to assess whether the broader scientific community is also under the same degree of financial pressure, or an even greater one. That’s why we are blogging for Chemistry World: we want to know how much of their own personal income chemists are spending on doing their research.

So please take our survey, and join in the debate by engaging with ‘#scispends’ on Twitter. Your contributions will give us the data we need to resolve the problem and hopefully provide you with information you can use to back requests for funding and support for new trainees. Our results will be reviewed in a later print edition of Chemistry World.

The x-ray has always been a mysterious thing. An invisible beam of high energy electromagnetic radiation that passes through most kinds of matter, it is even named ‘x’ after the mathematical variable used to denote the unknown. And the x-ray itself isn’t the only unknown thing – so are its origins. Sources suggest it was an accidental discovery, but there aren’t as many sources as there should be, due to a very non-accidental fire.

Wilhelm Röntgen, German physicist and discoverer of x-rays, died on 10 February 1923, whereupon all his laboratory records were burnt on his request.

It was an extreme action, but not an unusual one.

While modern science is becoming more and more transparent, not very long ago secrecy was the tool of the inventor’s trade. Through secrecy, successful men were able to preserve their impression of genius, compete against their peers and prevent their ideas from being stolen. The most coveted prize was not scientific elucidation but personal recognition – impossible for those who were too open and lost their ideas to the less scrupulous. It wasn’t just seen amongst scientists; William Howson Taylor, founder of the admired Ruskin pottery, had all his notes burnt at his death in 1935. And so the method was lost with its maker.

We are left with a fuzzy picture, not much easier to illuminate than x-rays themselves, and can only imagine the scene in Röntgen’s laboratory in the winter of 1895…

A dark room, because Röntgen was working with light.

A screen coated with barium platinocyanide.

On the bench top nine feet away, a Crookes cathode-ray tube, a large glass gas-filled bulb that fluoresces when a high-voltage electrical current is discharged through it. But the bulb is not visible, because Röntgen has covered it with thick black cardboard to contain the distracting glow (and because it’s currently switched off.)

Then Röntgen turns on the tube and the screen begins to glow green…

Nine feet was further than the reach of the blocked cathode rays that Röntgen understood, and he quickly concluded that he had made a new, unknown kind of ray that could travel through cardboard. He tried it with aluminium, copper and brick – it travelled through all of those too. In fact, the only material he found that could absorb it was thick lead.

So naturally, he did what any discerning 19th century scientist would do in his position: he stuck his hand in it. On the screen, he could see the image of his own bones, surrounded by a greenish glowing flesh. He seized some photographic film, and took the first x-ray image. When he repeated the procedure to photograph his wife’s hand and rings for his publication on a ‘new kind of rays’, she famously cried, ‘I have seen my own death!’

100 years later, medical physicist Gerrit Kemerink of the Maastricht University Medical Center thought to piece together some of the missing evidence, and recreated the setup of some of the very first x-ray machines. With a hand he borrowed from medical supplies, he set up the experiment just as Röntgen might have done, and tested the results. Horrifyingly, he found that the hand needed a full 90 minutes of exposure to create a clear image, providing a radiation dose 1500 times more than the dose supplied by a modern x-ray procedure. No wonder early x-ray testers reported burns and hair loss!

Modern x-ray production methods also help us understand what was going on in Röntgen’s Crookes tube: he used a hot cathode to produce electrons, which were then accelerated under a voltage, striking a metal target and knocking off more electrons. Not only were electrons emitted, but the metal was left full of electron vacancies, holes from where the AWOL electrons had been knocked. X-rays are emitted when high energy electrons shift into lower energy vacancies, and so the energy of the x-ray is specific to the metal they came from. Today, copper anode metals are mostly used, but Röntgen probably produced x-rays by ionising the gas inside his tube. If so, he would have produced lower energy x-rays and so required the longer measuring times.

Röntgen may have burned the notes and reports, preventing us from ever understanding the precise details of his experiments, but he did publish three papers on these mysterious new rays, and left us with an invaluable scientific and medical tool.

The famous Lego bricks have invaded almost all walks of life. Not content to remain as just a construction-themed toy, Lego has branched out into theme parks, video games, board games, clothing lines and even a movie. Until recently, however, chemistry remained a relatively unbuilt area. This changed last year with the production of an all female Lego academics lab, which was met by Lego and science fans alike screaming ‘just take my money!’ The set featured an archaeologist, an astronomer and a chemist and was not only super fun but helped to promote women in science. The plastic academic trio shot to stardom with their Twitter account showcasing some of the finer moments of life in the lab. Now, Lego has finally found a place at the pinnacle of scientific achievement on the front cover of the latest issue of Chemical Science.

A Lego chemist on the cover is dashing back into the lab carrying a flask ready for her next experiment. She is already wearing her white coat, blue gloves and glasses showing that even minifigures are safety conscious. Like many lab users she has made good use of the wall space by drawing out her chemical reactions. Although, the lab does seem rather open to the elements with the sun, clouds and rain threatening to ruin or in fact perhaps aid the artificial photosynthesis project taking place.

Lego is an awesome tool for building miniature skyscrapers and racing cars. So why not use it to build miniature or, more realistically, gigantic chemical structures? I think the authors could have used a little more creativity with the Lego for this cover – surely it’s not that difficult to build their cobalt complex out of the little bricks? Excuse me at this point whilst I run up to the attic, dive into my childhood supply and attempt to create a chemical masterpiece…

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…actually it is quite difficult after all! Lego may seem like a nice alternative to the old ball and stick modelling kit, but it is not quite so specialised just yet.

The research performed by the group of Erwin Reisner, from the University of Cambridge, tells of their latest work on the development of a cobalt catalyst for H2 evolution. The metal complex they created shows good stability when anchored onto a metal oxide surface and also enhanced activity compared to previously reported cobalt catalysts. For a closer look into how the catalyst was built step by step (or perhaps brick by brick) head over to Chemical Science.

When starting a new experiment, it is great if there is a standard lab protocol (written by someone else in the lab) that you can use. These tried and tested methods usually increase the chance of your experiment working. On receiving the new protocol, the first thing you need to do is read the method carefully so you can plan accordingly; I’ve been caught out before – I found out part way through what I thought was a two hour incubation that it was really 12 hours, so I ended up having to finish off the experiment on Saturday!

The next thing is to check that all the equipment and chemicals you need are in the lab (and in large enough quantities), especially if the protocol is not used often. This allows you to book the equipment if necessary, and means you don’t have to run round trying to find things once you have started. Finding the equipment is relatively easy: it tends to be quite big, and people generally don’t walk off with it without asking; chemicals, on the other hand, can be stored in many different locations around the lab depending on their properties, and occasionally people will put them back in the wrong place.

There are different ways you can approach finding the chemicals you need: you can check the lab’s chemical list (if one exists) to see if there is any and where it is stored; you can ask someone in the lab; you can look up the properties of the chemical to give you an idea of where to look; or you can try and find it yourself using only the name. This last method usually starts with ‘I’ll just have a quick look to see if we have any, it shouldn’t take long’, and often end ups being a great chemical hunt that takes ages.

The first stop on the search is usually the room-temperature chemicals, as there are more of these. They can be split up into communal stores and specific groups’ (or even individuals’) chemicals, and tend to be kept in store cupboards or on shelves around the lab. When venturing into other groups’ stores, be sure to ask permission before you take anything. If this search is fruitless then there are the specialised chemical cabinets (flammables, halogens, poisons) to check, the fridges and freezers (again both communal and individual lab group ones), and finally the deep freeze (–80oC), though not many chemicals are stored there.

If – after searching all these places and exhausting the other methods – you still can’t find what you’re looking for, you’ll have to order it fresh. Sometimes, after putting in the order, someone will point out that the chemical is in some place that you didn’t search, or you’ll stumble across it by accident. But at least next time you know where to find it – well, hopefully you will anyway!

Nobody had thought to study the orange sludge that was scraped off the Union Carbide pipes after manufacturing cyclopentadiene, but perhaps they should have done. When chemists eventually set their gaze on this colourful by product, the ensuing discovery of ferrocene catalysed a branch of research.

Organometallics had proved themselves a hard puzzle to crack, with only a handful developed by the 1950s, including the infamous Grignard reagents. Iron organometallics remained elusive, which is why Thomas Kealy and Peter Pauson, working at Duquesne University in 1951, had no intention of synthesising any. In fact, they were trying to make a totally organic compound: pentafulvalene, a molecule built from two cyclopentadiene rings fused together by a double bond. Samuel Miller, John Tebboth and John Tremaine, chemists at the British Oxygen Company, demonstrated no more interest in organometallics: their aim was to develop a new method of preparing amides from nitrogen and hydrocarbons, including cyclopentadiene. Both threw in iron catalysts – after all, iron was not going to form stable organometallic compounds, was it?

Yes it was. And this time when the orange sludge was produced, the groups did decide to study it, if only because they thought they might have made their target compounds. The composition – C10H10­Fe – proved them both to be wrong.

But what was this new molecule? Whatever it was, it was soluble in all organic solvents, but not in water, and unaffected by 10% NaOH and concentrated HCl, even after boiling. In fact, it remained stable up to 400°C, melting at 173ºC without entertaining the risk of decomposition. The two reports were published in Nature and the Journal of the Chemical Society respectively, with the proposed structure of two cyclopentadiene rings joined by a single bond bisected by Fe2+. That might have been that, if it were not for the amazing power of doubt in driving the advance of research…

In the chemistry department of Harvard University, Robert Burns Woodward was perusing the literature when he came across the Kealy and Pauson paper. He didn’t like it: something niggled at him. So he set his graduate student, Myron Rosenblum, the task of repeating and expanding on the work with the help of Geoffrey Wilkinson. IR and NMR data soon indicated identical ionic-covalent bonding across all of the carbon atoms, and Woodward and Wilkinson formulated the true ferrocene structure: one iron atom sandwiched between two misaligned, flat aromatic pentagons. At the Technische Hochschule, Munich, Ernst Otto Fischer produced x-ray crystallographic images of ferrocene, which led him to the same conclusion. It was a brave first step into a bizarre unknown territory: no such structures had been known before – but soon they would.

With the pioneering concept of aromatic-metal π-bonding and the overhaul of classical ligand theories, organometallics exploded onto the chemical scene. Between them, Woodward, Wilkinson, Fischer and others produced a cascade of new molecules with novel functions, delving deep into d-block chemistry, Friedel-Crafts acylation and other aromatic substitutions. Today, metallocenes have found applications ranging from antiknocking fuel additives to syndioselective polymerisation catalysts and charge-carrying components in diabetic blood sugar monitors.

But what really tops off this story is its shining example of conscientious peer review. All too often, scientists don’t repeat each others’ work. Whether they are demotivated by lack of equipment, resources, time or comprehensible instructions, without repetitions, there is no real way to falsify new findings or shift the paradigms of existing understanding in the light of new discoveries. Indeed, the preparation and characterisation of ferrocene wouldn’t have been repeated if the chemical community hadn’t been so shocked by the discovery. It was hard to believe such a lucky windfall. Amongst others, Oxford crystallographer Jack Dunitz was so unconvinced that he and colleague Leslie Orgel repeated the whole thing once again and proved it to be – correct. ‘There was no doubt about it,’ Dunitz confirmed. Sometimes glorious accidents happen, but often a sludge is, after all, just a sludge.

’The field of scientific abstraction encompasses independent kingdoms of ideas and of experiments and within these, rulers whose fame outlasts the centuries. But they are not the only kings in science. He also is a king who guides the spirit of his contemporaries by knowledge and creative work, by teaching and research in the field of applied science, and who conquers for science provinces which have only been raided by craftsmen.’ – Fritz Haber

This month marks the one hundred year anniversary of the first use of chemical warfare as a strategic tool in battle. Fritz Haber was heavily involved in, and a proponent of, gassing with chlorine as a method of warfare. Whilst his work in this area may have resulted in huge loss of life, he also changed the world for the better through the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process.

The Haber-Bosch process, named after Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, was one of the first industrial chemical processes that I learned about at high school. At the time, I found it incredibly interesting that some pressure and some heat, with some iron thrown in for good measure, could turn nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas into malodourous ammonia. The reaction had been known before but the low yields and slow reaction times made it an unattractive prospect for an industrial process. Haber realised that the addition of high temperature and pressure with an iron catalyst could make this a highly efficient process. Haber won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1918 for his identification of the process, while Bosch won the prize in 1931 for his work in scaling up the process.

With cheap access to ammonia, fertilizers were became more readily available and, as such, millions of people around the world benefit from the availability of good quality crops. But the availability of ammonia also led to an proliferation in the use of nitrate-based explosives, as Wilhelm Ostwald discovered that ammonia could be converted relatively simply into nitric acid and nitrates using a platinum catalyst (the Ostwald Process).

Haber’s father owned a dye pigments and paints business, so it is not a surprise that he entered into the field of chemistry. After attending university, a brief period working for his father and various apprenticeships, he took up an academic position at the University of Karlsruhe.

As with the other laureates I’ve researched on this blog, Haber is connected to a number of highly influential scientists, including Walther Nernst, his closest academic relative,. Nernst helped to develop the modern field of physical chemistry, including electrochemistry and thermodynamics. All undergraduate chemists should recognise his name from learning all about the Nernst equation! He won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1920 for his work into thermochemistry. Through Nernst, Haber is also connected to Irving Langmuir who won the Nobel prize in 1932 for his research on surface chemistry.

Haber is related to Adolf von Baeyer, an organic chemist who is famous for the synthesis of indigo. In 1905 he was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for his research in the field of organic chemistry, particularly organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds. There is also an academic connection between Haber and Bosch, although they worked independently from one another on the same chemical process. Once Haber had developed the Haber process, it was purchased by the German chemical company BASF, where Carl Bosch managed to scale up the reaction to the industrial level, resulting in the Haber-Bosch process.

Whether you believe Fritz Haber is a great man or not, it cannot be said that his (and Bosch’s) finding was not a great one.

There’s just one week left to vote for your favourite Take 1… minute for chemistry in health video.

The shortlisted videos are online for one more week – this is your last chance to pick your favourite to win the £500 cash prize!

The chemical sciences play a fundamental role in improving healthcare. We invited undergraduates through to early career researchers to produce an original video that communicated how chemistry helps us address healthcare challenges in an imaginative way. The videos show the use of nanoparticles for drug delivery through to the development of antifreezes useful for long-term blood and organ storage. Others explain the chemistry of fat cells, illustrate the chemistry of toothpaste, and highlight the impact of chemistry in treating cancer and tackling antibiotic resistance.